6 Triggers of the fearful avoidant attachment style

Hi! I’m Paulien and I’m so happy you are here! In this blog I’m going to talk about six fearful avoidant attachment style triggers. As a fearful avoidant it is super confusing if you don’t know what’s happening. Let’s dive in!

So first of all, when you get triggered what can happen is that you get into what I call a ‘crash state’ which is pretty much when your fearful avoidant attachment style is triggered to the max and for a fearful avoidant that is very confusing. The other two insecure attachment styles have crash states too but they are a little bit more straightforward and always the same. For the fearful avoidant it can be on the one hand that you are having the really active form of fear (so the active form of crash state) which means you just start pleasing and you start getting a lot of energy and unrest that you have to figure this out and have to solve this. It can also lead to obsessive thinking.

So when you are in a healthy relationship, sometimes this leads to obsessive thinking about whether this relationship is right, whether you are feeling enough, whether you are in love enough. And what can also happen, and it can flip flop between the two very rapidly, is that you just shut down completely and that you don’t feel anything anymore. You might even get really tired, like extremely tired so that you can’t even walk or talk anymore. So it can be either one of those, or it can go one way or another.

Now we are diving into the six fearful avoidance triggers with examples. These are mostly deactivation triggers. So that means you are going to deactivate, which means pushing your partner away. And sometimes the triggers are not straightforward. It’s not always your partner coming too close, but it can also be other random things that make it hard to connect to your partner, to relationships or to love.

#1 Feeling dumb / incapable / irresponsible
And it could be that you guys are just talking about something and you say something that is not right, like you’re watching the news and you get the capital of a country wrong. And your partner makes a remark on that, not even being mean, just that it’s wrong. That can fully trigger your fearful avoidant attachment style if it’s a belief that you have that when ‘you’re dumb it’s really bad’ and you have to be smart to be worthy of love.

And so what can happen is you’re watching the news, you make a remark, your partner says something and you just get super angry at your partner. That could happen and you don’t really know why. All of a sudden, these thoughts come flooding in that try to put your partner down, that make him/her seem less desirable, that maybe focus on his/her appearance or on the fact that his/her nose is too big or crooked or just really small things to make him/her less than you. Just to feel a bit of control and security again. And it can happen out of nowhere if you don’t know that this is actually quite a big trigger for fearful avoidants and it’s mostly a trigger for fearful avoidants leaning dismissive.

#2 Feeling vulnerable/weak/tired/sick
This is a big one, because feeling vulnerable for a lot of fearful avoidants was not safe in their childhood. And a lot have the experience that when they were vulnerable and they shared things or they did things or they said things from a vulnerable space: that was actually used against them at a later stage. So being vulnerable is like: ‘the more vulnerable I am, the more you can hurt me’, so I’m not going to do that. So being vulnerable can be when you share things and also what a lot of fearful avoidants do is that they’re actually very vulnerable in a first contact and then retreat. That can be very confusing for the other person because it could be that they are just completely open to that and just values you sharing that and then wants to build whatever, a friendship or relationship with you. But you felt vulnerable, so you got triggered and pull back. And of course, you don’t do that on purpose. That just happens because you get triggered.

I had that too a lot. Then I started affirming to myself that it’s okay to be sick, it’s okay to be tired and still receive love. When I started healing that more and more I was able to stay in contact, in connection.

#3 The moment of connection / deep relaxation
Connection is very scary for the fearful avoidant. It’s almost the core of the fearful avoidant attachment style: you want connection but you’re afraid of it. So you pull people closer and then you push them away when they get too close. And the getting too close part is usually the moment that you feel connected to them. And that might sound a little bit weird but it’s actually a moment that you can feel when you’re attuned to it.

You can feel the moment of connection. And just that moment of connection can be very frightening. And it could  be that that’s just because your parent had that too. So whenever you had that moment of connection with your parent  which babies and children seek out naturally) that’s the moment when your parent kind of got that jump scare and started lashing out or started pushing you away or started becoming critical. So you associate that moment of connection with pain and shame and guilt and that’s why that can be a trigger. Which means that you have that jump scare and you push your partner away.

So that’s how the pattern just keeps repeating.

And then also a moment of deep relaxation can be a trigger because your system is just so used to being hyper vigilant and ‘on’ all the time that it feels unsafe to completely relax. So there are quite some fearful avoidants that have a lot of problems sleeping, either falling asleep or waking up in the middle of the night in fear and sometimes even in panic. Or waking up in the morning with fear and panic because sleep feels so vulnerable, feels so as if you’re letting all control go. And that’s what fearful avoidants do not like, or your fear brain doesn’t like, because you feel like you always need to be in control and always alert and know what might happen and be prepared to fight, essentially. So a moment of deep relaxation, whether it is with your partner or by yourself, can actually be a trigger for the fearful avoidant attachment style. Which is kind of crazy, right?

I mean, you deserve deep relaxation, you deserve rest, your body deserves rest and deep relaxation. So I really wish that for you. Maybe just knowing this can help you to breathe a little deeper and just stay in that relaxation a little bit longer.

#4 The possibility of hurting someone
So the fearful avoidant usually has a very big moral sense of when you hurt somebody and when you don’t. And actually, I think a lot of fearful avoidants are just always afraid that they will hurt people whether they do something or whether they don’t do something. So just the possibility of hurting someone can cause a fearful avoidant to be triggered and go into a crash state, which can mean that you retreat completely and not even try because you were already in that shame spiral before anything even happened.

So a concrete example of that is that a lot of fearful avoidants get triggered when they start thinking about the future: what if I find out he or she is not ‘the one’ after we’ve been married or after we’ve bought a house or after we’ve got children. And then when we kind of peel the layers back on that, it’s just: I have to hurt them even more. So it’s almost like the logic of ‘I might as well just break up now when I haven’t done that much damage yet’ because as we go on, it will only get worse and worse. And what if I have to hurt his/her feelings? So the possibility, even if it’s far in the future, of hurting someone’s feelings, can absolutely trigger your fearful avoidant attachment style and cause you to seek 100% security control and certainty. Which means you want your relationship to be 100% perfect just so that you have that feeling of control or certainty that you won’t hurt anybody’s feelings. And of course this doesn’t work and that’s not the way to go about it.

It’s okay to trust yourself and it’s okay to trust that between now and then there are so many more days and weeks and months of you investing in the relationship and of you healing and figuring things out together so you are not powerless. You get to trust yourself that you will always find solutions and that you will always learn and grow and that you will find a way.

#5 The fear of doing / having done something wrong
This is also a very big trigger. And that could be a state that you’re perpetually in, which makes it really hard. So there are fearful avoidants that are just in the crash state constantly, that are just pretty much constantly in that panic mode. And a lot of times this feeling of ‘I’m always doing something wrong’ is driving a lot of that crash state, perpetual crash state. So when you start healing that, you will notice more space and more lightness and more ease and rest and calm and peace. Wich I want for you so badly.

#6 People getting angry
And that’s a very clear one. And that could lead to a few things when you’re still in your fight mode that will lead you to fight. Like you will pick a fight, you will go at it and be emotionally volatile. When you start healing and you start feeling more and more vulnerable, it could lead to getting triggered and feeling that little kid, that little girl, that little boy inside just being in panic mode because having somebody be angry at you was not safe when you were younger and you probably experienced that on more than one occasion. So you just retreat.

You either start pleasing or start doing anything to not make that person mad or you push the person away and you just stop talking, you stop doing anything just to not make it worse, not make that person more angry. So it could go either way, but that’s definitely a trigger. And sometimes it can even be that the other person isn’t angry, isn’t remotely angry, but you are so hyper vigilant that you interpret it as angry.

And I noticed that sometimes, even still a little bit with my husband, who never, ever gets angry. Sometimes he’s just a little bit frustrated. And that still is like there’s just the tiniest bit of left and maybe that’s just a normal human reaction of frustration or anger on your partner’s part. But yeah, people getting angry definitely is a trigger, even if you just think they are getting angry, which is not always even the case.

All right, so these were six fearful avoidant triggers. Did you learn new triggers? Did you have any eye openers? Let me know in the comments below. I always like to hear from you. And also: how do you handle being triggered? Or what do you notice are triggers for you that can put you in a crash state?

I am so incredibly happy you’re here!

Much love,
Paulien

This is not to diagnose. I’m not a psychologist and it’s not black and white. You can definitely recognise so much of the fearful avoidant attachment style and maybe you’re even dominantly securely attached. So don’t see this as this is a strong diagnosis. I am just here to tell you all about it and really help you understand yourself a little bit better.